Hacker News Reader

Comment by pesus | Hacker News Reader

I think the key difference is they can just easily ban you from the service if you damage the vehicle, and every ride is tied to your account from the beginning. Those things can always happen in Uber/Lyft, but I imagine the fees you can receive and the risk of being banned completely keeps it under control.

View on HN

I just watched a video where a guy kayak'd down a new york city river with countless electric share scooters thrown into the water by people who just didn't want to pay for a scooter ride. All up and down the river for 8km they were there.

I think the OP is on to something.

If we get people somehow managing to toss Waymos into rivers, I think we've got bigger problems...

Those weren’t riders throwing them in, they were vandals who made a game out of it for social credit.

This has been going on for years. A large part of it, at least in my experience, is people who object to scooters being parked in a manner that blocks pedestrian or cyclist paths.

One particularly funny incident I'm aware of involved an acquaintance who was overcharged by a scooter company and couldn't get a resolution via support. Being a 'frontier justice' sort of fellow, he rounded up 20+ scooters and chucked them all into a pond in the name of justice.

Difference being that now there isn’t a driver there to recognise the damage - now I have to take a million pictures of the inside of my auto taxi and report any damage promptly so I don’t get blamed for the piss covered seats by the next person and banned from the platform. I don’t trust the cameras to capture everything they need to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com